Lucy was the one who first saw the smoke rising from Sanctuary. It was early in the morning as she stumbled blearily out the door, meaning to milk Clarabell and use it to make a good portion of razorgrain porridge for breakfast. Her bucket was not where she had left it. Quietly grumbling to herself, she circled around to the other side of the house, in the hopes that her mother had forgotten it by the pump again.
And there it was, clear as day. A thin, gray line against the blue sky. A campfire in Sanctuary.
Someone was over there.
She told her parents about it over breakfast, her voice low and calm, in a desperate bid to keep them as much as herself from panicking. After all, the odds were that it was nothing. It was not entirely unheard of for scavengers, vagrants and merchants to pass through the old suburb every now and again. A leaking roof and a wall full of holes is still shelter enough for a weary body when you've been on the road for weeks.
Then again…the thought hung, unspoken, ominous, a silent black cloud drifting over the breakfast table. Odds were not something that had ever been in the favor of the Abernathy family.
Blake took the news in stride, all things considered. His spoon barely paused in its route to his mouth as he hurriedly reassured the family that he'd keep a close eye on their new neighbor, that there was most likely nothing to worry about, but that he would feel quite a bit better if he could have a look at everyone's weapons sometime today. Lucy took her gun out of its makeshift holster right then and there and passed it over the table to her father. Her mother followed suit, those old lines of worry crinkling her forehead once again.
Around noon, Blake took a break from his fieldwork and sat out in back at the pile of crates they'd turned into a workbench, taking each gun apart and meticulously cleaning each piece one by one, with a thin twig wound round with cotton. While he was unaware, Lucy snuck away from her chores to peer around the corner and with a start, saw how badly his hands were shaking as he worked. How tight his jaw was. How sad, his eyes.
She saw Mary falling to the ground again and again in her mind's eye, her father charging like a madman at the raider who had done it, clawing at every inch of that monster's exposed flesh, gouging his eye with a red-handled screwdriver. At that, the rest of them had fled.
And Mary was buried at the edge of the fields.
The haunted suburb over the hill had always been something of a mixed blessing to the Abernathy family. When they needed new fence posts or a hunk of corrugated metal, it was a damn sight easier than any other option to pop over there and pry what they sought from the packed earth and the sides of the old family homes.
Lucy's father had taken her on many such adventures when she was a young girl. She could still remember the first time she'd departed the boundaries of the farm - she must have been seven or eight, perhaps a little younger. Her pa had saddled up the old brahmin, stowed a collection of tools in the saddlebags and hefted her on top. She'd waved goodbye to her sister and mother as they vanished around the bend, farther away already than they had ever been in her entire life thus far.
She could still see her father's hand - the skin softer than it was now, the bony knuckles not quite so pronounced - resting on his gun, tensed to draw it at the first sign of trouble. She hadn't understood then. Were they going to kill rabbits? Her younger self had been quite certain that they were not. "Scah-ven-ging," her father had plainly said that morning over cold porridge left over from the day before. "I'm taking Lucy scah-ven-ging today. If it's all well and good with you, Connie?"
It was all very confusing to a child who had never seen a ghoul and knew nothing but fairy tales about Super Mutants.
She was not sure what she was expecting to see. Another farm, but broken down? That was the sanest image her imagination could conjure. Or would it be all blood and spikes, like the stronghold of the Master, the Evil Super Mutant Prince who had held an entire kingdom under his great green foot until a hero had come and put him in his place?
Thoughts of fairy tales did not leave her mind as they toddled on, passing by the oddest-shaped building she had yet seen. Her father had told her that it was one of the last remnants of a mystic order which once had the power to command inanimate pieces of metal into life. She giggled at first and then sternly told him that she was far too old to believe such things any longer. "Oh!" her father had gasped, his eyes widening with mock sorrow, "Does that mean that you're too old to be my princess too?"
She was thoroughly considering the question when they turned around the bend and found themselves peering over the edge into another world. Every thought was dashed from Lucy's mind in an instant. Crossing the rickety old bridge, its timbers groaning in seemingly agonizing pain beneath the weight of the brahmin, was like entering a long-abandoned fairy kingdom. The houses all seemed so strange, alien, as they looked back at them through empty windows and crooked holes, like gaps where teeth once were in a deranged grin. She felt dizzy as she looked around, her imagination working overtime. It was like nothing she'd ever seen before, nothing she'd ever imagined existing. Where was the windmill, the feeding troughs, the water pump? Who lived here like that?
Grinning from ear to ear, her father had handed her a claw hammer and a plastic cup and the corners of his eyes crinkling in merriment, told her to gather all the nails she could find. Just before she ran off, he grabbed her by the back of the collar and reeled her in. "There's a robot that lives in these parts." he said solemnly, all seriousness, "He takes care of his old family's house. I'm not sure if he'll be here today, but if you see him, be polite and you'll be just fine." Lucy nodded sagely, trying hard to contain her brimming excitement. It felt like joy was bursting out of every pore of her skin. A real-life guardian of a haunted village! A doomed knight, fated to serve his dead lord! It was far too much. She barely registered the fact that her father had pulled a crowbar from the pack and was setting about the markedly less-glamorous job of prying loose a section of crumbling wall.
She strolled along, the hammer heavy in her hand, the cup all but forgotten as she peeked through windows and ducked under doors, populating the empty rooms with visions of warm families and glowing lights. There was something so beautifully tragic about the rusty shells, the gaping emptiness of a space left behind.
It was so different from her little farm, way out in the middle of nowhere, visited by no one but the occasional traveling merchant or passing scavenger. So many people, all of them living in one place. How many could fit in one house? she mused, A family of ten, at least. The numerous fenced-in yards must have been where they grew their food, though they seemed hardly big enough for the job and many of them were littered with old chairs and furniture.
Every once in a while she stumbled upon a tiny house, a smaller version of the big ones just large enough for her to crawl into on her hands and knees. Naturally, she assumed that this was where the children must have lived until they were tall enough to get into the big houses. She came away from the experience rather more glad that such barbaric practices were no longer part of parenting today.
She did not gather much in the way of nails that day.
It wasn't entirely her fault. Most of the good stuff had already been looted long before the Abernathy family were even a speck on the horizon. It must have been an exceedingly attractive place after the war - all those stocked pantries, the wiring in the walls, the medicine cabinets ripe for the picking. And of course, the easy building materials. She wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if every raider within twenty miles had some part of Sanctuary built into the walls of their hideaways.
Every once in a while, as the years passed and she became more adept at stripping what she needed from the blasted land, a spare chem or a can of food ten times as old as her might turn up. She gained a knack for wrenching rusty nails from the walls that anyone else would write off as hopeless causes and digging out lip-smacking mutfruits from the tangle of vines that consumed the backyards of many of the houses. But on the whole, it was a place that served very little use but for scrap. Scavengers tended to avoid it and raiders passed it up for more lucrative targets. No, that was not the reason why her father looked to the north with fear, his fingers tapping on his gun as the column of gray smoke made its appearance once again.
The danger was its very location.
It was far too good of a setup - an island surrounded on all sides by irradiated water, accessible only by a single choke point. All it would take was one savvy raider to tip the scale in a direction no one wanted to go. Extortion, gunpoint bargaining, savage beasts set on the non-compliant for sport. They'd heard too many similar stories from other farms, too many tragedies of burgeoning industry set upon by thieving hands and greedy hearts.
Blake Abernathy had considered taking out the bridge more than once. A load of well-placed explosives would solve that problem fast enough. It was ancient and sturdy, its foundations rooted in the river like a petrified tree, but given a stern push, there was little doubt that it would go sooner or later.
They just hadn't gotten around to doing it. Sanctuary was too rich in building materials, there was always other work to do, explosives cost more caps than anyone was willing to part with right now and when was any of that ever going to be a problem anyway?
And so it remained, the wind whistling through its quiet rooms, the accumulated trash of centuries blowing across its cracked sidewalks, the swings of its silent playground creaking ominously when stirred. It slumbered there, in its crumbling glory, all but waiting for someone to cross the chasm and claim it.
The thefts started a week later.
At first it was small things - a tato plant stripped of fruit, a wrench gone missing, the old welding mask most certainly not where it was supposed to have been. Not much of value was ever taken and the thief did not appear to be a particularly daring one. Their savings remained locked away safely inside, their food stores untouched, their makeshift arsenal left alone.
But the violation of privacy was more than enough to put Blake Abernathy on permanent edge. His hand constantly drifted over his pistol as he worked. Movement in the bushes startled him every single time. After dinner he would sit out on the veranda, rifle in hand and wait, watching for hours until he was too tired to keep his eyes open.
Connie was just as distraught. She gained a tenseness and a hardness that Lucy had not seen in her since the day of her sister's death and had very much been hoping she would never see again. She was frustrated by the smallest things, angry at everyone, crushingly sorrowful when she thought no one was watching. Every time she yelled at Lucy for some minuscule infraction, she'd almost immediately take it back, apologizing repeatedly, constantly, to the point of agonizing distraction, by tearfully confessing how much she loves her.
Lucy went about her chores as though nothing was wrong, telling herself that lie again and again until she half-believed it herself, until it was nearly, but not entirely, concrete fact. But her anxiety was like a constant whine in the background, a machine turning in the distance, its purpose obscure and the location of its controls long lost to time.
She slept with her gun on her pillow and glanced up for smoke signals in the sky more often than she cared to admit.
Nearly a month after the thefts had started, Blake Abernathy was dozing on the veranda, rifle on his knee, the thought of going to bed for the night getting more attractive by the minute. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes for perhaps the tenth time that night and was about to leave his post - when he saw it.
A shadowy figure, crawling on hands and knees, creeping around the edge of the melon patch, its hands closing around a particularly juicy specimen.
Lucy had heard a shout and the sound of two shots fired in quick succession. She met her mother's wide eyes and wild hair at the door and together, the two of them pushed through.
Blake was strolling through the fields, the rifle dangling lackadaisically from his fingers, his other hand clenched into a fist at his side.
Connie fussed and worried as he walked through the door, his face stern and impassive. He sat heavily at the dinner table, the old chair creaking and groaning beneath his solid weight. Without being asked, Connie poured him a shot of whiskey and passed it across the table.
He laid the gun down gently beside him, downed the shot in one go and confessed that he was not certain if he had wounded their visitor, though he had meant only to fire warning shots. Connie patted his hand reassuringly, saying that it would all look better in the morning. Lucy felt sick to her stomach. She eyed the whiskey, weighing the pros and cons of a shot for herself and thought better of it.
After a restless night and a dreary morning, when she'd dragged herself out of bed to tend to Clarabelle, she stumbled across a scrap of brilliant blue fabric caught on a fence post. She gazed at it, blinking confusedly, for a moment wondering how a physical piece of sky had come to rest on their farm. It blew in the wind, jewel-like and strange, smooth to the touch, its threads barely noticeable, as unlike her mother's rough homespun as it could possibly be.
Her parents assumed it to be part of the uniform of a new raider outfit. There were strange ones out there, ones who covered themselves in body paint and gleaming jewelry and brightly colored furs and howled at the moon. And it was not entirely beyond the pale to stumble upon a cache of finely preserved fabric from the old world, despite how otherworldly it all seemed to Lucy.
They swept through the woods together after breakfast but, rather thankfully, found no blood or sign of a struggle.
The thefts ceased entirely after that.
Lucy checked for the smoke rising from Sanctuary out of the corner of her eye every morning, a small ritual to ease her conscience. There were many days when it did not come at all, when she feared that the stranger over the hill was sick or injured or dying alone in a miserable shack. But then a week would pass and once again, she'd see the sign that there was life over the hill. It made her glad in a way she couldn't explain, having someone, anyone else living close by, watching for the smoke from their campfire.
As time went on, her father calmed down and stopped cleaning the guns every single day. Her mother's tenseness evaporated in starts and stops until one day she was humming as she worked once again.
It was late enough for the brightest stars of the night to wink into existence in the deepening darkness of the sky when Lucy kicked the door open, her arms fully laden with a bucket of rapidly browning carrot peels. They would make almost as good an addition to the compost heap as Clarabelle's cowpats. The peelings that they hadn't fried and made into carrot fritters for dinner, that is.
The three of them had spent an excruciatingly long day armed with knives and scrap buckets, peeling and chopping the leftover bounty of their harvest for pickling. Tomorrow they'd finish up most of the canning. Tonight the floor was covered with trough after trough of marinating vegetables and it stunk of vinegar to the rafters. The results of the process were never quite as good as Lucy had hoped they would be - everything lost its flavor in due time and by the end of the winter every beautiful color of nature was reduced to a lifeless, tasteless gray. But it kept them healthy in the lean months and that was all that mattered.
Lost in her thoughts of how she'd entertain herself come winter, she dumped the peelings on to the pile, thumping the bottom of the bucket loudly to get them all out. She imagined that she'd make another attempt at reading a book. Neither of her parents were terribly literate and she was not far ahead of them in her studies. The last time she'd gone to Diamond City, she'd sat in the back of the one-room schoolhouse and taken in all she could from the single lesson she was permitted. The teacher and his robot had given her some of their lesson plans and a load of verbal encouragement after it was over. Every so often during the summer, when she had a moment before bed, she'd take that lesson plan out and trace the letters with her finger, one by one. There were a few more words that she could identify now - dog, cat, rake, melon. It wasn't quite enough to make sense of a sentence yet, but she was getting there. Writing words in the dirt with a stick was like performing magic in front of her parents and their reaction never ceased to entertain her.
She turned away, her head abuzz with plans and thoughts of bed when she suddenly found herself staring down an expressionless face. The bucket slipped from her fingers, falling to the soft dirt with the quietest of whumphs. She could hear her heart pounding inside her ears, her blood rushing through her veins.
It took her a moment to realize that the face was not a face, but a mask. A welding mask, its eyes a single slit of bulletproof glass, regarding her coolly. She noted the dent in the chin where she'd most definitely dropped it as a child playing pretend and her eyes narrowed. The figure wearing it crept forward. Involuntarily, her heart racing in her chest so fast she thought it fit to burst, Lucy lurched backwards.
The figure drew a silvery pistol from the depths of its hide jacket and held it, their hands shaking, the sound of a button rapidly clicking on and off audible from where she was.
Fear coursing through her veins, her hand shot to her side and scrabbled at empty air. My pipe pistol… she thought dizzily, seeing its exact location in her mind's eye. Sitting on the makeshift workbench, half a broken screw hopelessly stuck in the receiver...
How fast could they get here if I screamed? she thought, the sour taste of fear rising in her mouth, Not faster than a bullet, surely.
The intruder was advancing.
The gun was in the figure's left hand now, glinting coldly in the moonlight, pointing only at the earth. She could see more clearly as the stranger approached, that they were swathed in a cape of shoddy hides sewn together with comical amounts of twine, the copious holes patched with bits of silvery duct tape. Lucy could hear them breathing heavily as they got closer, wheezing with every step, dragging their right leg piteously behind them as they limped into the open. She saw a dark blotch on the calf of their leather leggings and a trail of dark liquid snaking down the leg to vanish into the confines of a profusely duct-taped boot.
With a shuddering jolt, the intruder stopped, perhaps a mere foot and half away from her and slowly raised their right hand to the level of their chest. She saw a flash of brilliant blue fabric as the hide cape parted to reveal some sort of tight-fitting suit beneath, stained, worn and patched like the rest of the stranger's getup. Lucy smelled the too-familiar tang of iron in the air and noted the dried rust on the stranger's shaking hand. Her heart skipped a beat and then slowed, just for a fraction of a second.
"Do you…" she whispered, her voice coming out in an embarrassingly high-pitched squeak, "…need help? W-We have medicine. I-It's yours if you…"
The only answer she received was the impassible glint of the moonlight on the glass of the faceless welding mask. The stranger was fumbling with a pouch on their chest, trying again and again to undo a tiny bone clasp that they just couldn't seem to get their quivering fingers around. Slowly, her pity outweighing her fear at this point, Lucy reached out a hand to help them, just barely brushing the back of the stranger's hand. The visitor flinched as though Lucy had struck them across the face, sinking into the cape as though it were a protective blanket that a child might hide from monsters under.
"I'm sorry!" Lucy gasped, "I…I didn't mean…"
She heard a deep intake of air from beneath the mask and then the cape was pulled open to more easily reveal the pouch. It was attached to a crude bandolier slung across the figure's chest, its stitches awkward and ungainly. The tip of her tongue between her teeth, her own hands shaking now, she carefully took hold of the tiny bit of bone and threaded it through the loop of twine that served as a catch.
With a grunt of satisfaction, the stranger batted her hand away and slid two fingers into the tiny opening. When they were withdrawn, there was a long, delicate, chain tangled about them. Jewelry? It certainly didn't have any other practical use.
For a split second, the thought of tackling the intruder to the ground right now! flashed across her mind. Knocking the gun from their hand while they were distracted, racing for shelter, screaming at the top of her lungs while there was still a chance…
The thought evaporated as quickly as morning dew. With one last tug, the chain was free of its confines and the object on the end of it catching the light of the stars. It was a locket, the clasp broken, its tiny hinges held together with far more wishes than actual screws. It spun slowly in the night air as the stranger gradually reached out, their hand unsteady. Realizing what was happening far later than she should have, she hastily held out her hand and the stranger rested it gently in her waiting palm.
Hardly believing what it was she was looking at, she squinted at the picture inside in the dim light of the stars and glimpsed a tiny version of her own face looking back at her. She was smiling broadly in the way that children, but never adults in this world tend to do, the gap in her front teeth proudly displayed, a shredding tato sack dress gracing her skinny shoulders. A moment before her vision was blurred by tears, she saw Mary standing beside her in the picture, flexing her muscles, a grim look of mock-determination on her face.
She started to cry in earnest, her sturdy shoulders heaving with sobs in front of the shadowy stranger. Mary's locket! To see it again, to hold the one picture of her sister that had ever existed, taken by the one working camera any of them had ever seen. It was -
"He-ey…" she said softly to the visitor, hurriedly breaking out of her reverie, "I've got a stimpack inside if you…"
The stranger was gone as though they had never existed. Only the still trees cast their shadows on the tall grass.
Soon after that, the Abernathy family and the lone resident of Sanctuary adopted something of an unspoken truce. If a bushel of tatoes went missing in the night, that was not the end of the world. In all likelihood, it'd be replaced by a brace of fresh radroaches within the week. Other presents sometimes appeared on the doorstep as well - boxes of scavenged screws, nails, a pair of shoes exactly Connie's size at the exact moment when it could be declared that her old pair had given up the ghost.
Once or twice a year, Blake Abernathy filled up a basket with anything that could be spared and left it at the barricade by the old bridge. Lucy made sure there was always some sort of medicine packed and a proper needle and thread. They never saw anyone come out to pick it up, but by the next day it was always gone. That was thanks enough for them.
In the early days, they had tried to contact the stranger and failed every single time - even when they could see the fire burning behind the barricade and knew that there must be someone behind the wall tending it. Connie had considered it odd and excruciatingly rude behavior at first and vented her frustrations to anyone who would listen. For a long time a hard ball of disappointment formed in Lucy's stomach when she looked to the sky and knew that she would most likely never see the person on the other end of that thread of smoke again.
In the end, they made their peace easily enough with the quiet friend who lived on the other side of the hill. There are stranger things roaming the Commonwealth, after all.